CHICAGO–For many years, 6821 Western Avenue in Rogers Park was the site of the U LUCKY DAWG hot dog stand. Two years ago, it closed down. These days, the only sign of life in the large parking lot is the grass pushing up through cracks in the macadam. Below the sign’s dancing wiener, in one dusty window, there’s an application posted “to establish a mosque” here on this forlorn, suburban strip.

This unassuming snack shack at 6821 Western Avenue is also the latest battleground in the nationwide backlash against the building of mosques and prayer centers. It isn’t just lower Manhattan. These lesser-known fights are raging across the United States; from Portland, Maine to Alphareta, Georgia to Temecula, California. U LUCKY DAWG is one of the 35 controversial sites of prospective mosques and prayer centers across the United States, according to a two-year study recently published by the Pew Forum.

Here in Rogers Park, the town is claiming loss of tax revenue from the vacant hot dog stand, and guess why? The neighborhood is changing. The Poles and Germans who use to eat Lucky Dawgs are gone. In their place are immigrants from Pakistan, India, and Somalia, to name a few. Most of them are Muslims.

Amie Zander, the executive director of the West Ridge Chamber of Commerce, argues that the neighborhood can’t afford the mosque, since places of worship don’t pay property taxes. “We would lose it off the tax rolls,” Zander said. “It’s a prime piece of real estate.” According to Zander, there’s also the matter of “placement” and “aesthetics.” The Muslim group wasn’t going to alter the prominent building sufficiently to please their neighbors.

“It was going to look like a hotdog stand. I think the drive-thru was going to be there still,” she said by phone. The Muslims dispute this claim, saying they’d engaged a landscaper to improve the sad appearance of the abandoned building. As a gesture of good will, Zander has offered to help Faizan-e-Madina, the Islamic organization of roughly forty South Asian Muslims who applied to the City of Chicago for a permit to use the fast food joint as a place of prayer. Zander says she’ll assist the group in finding another prayer space with adequate parking to satisfy the zoning laws of City of Chicago. (There must be one parking space for every eight worshippers; and one bathroom for every 25.)

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“There are a lot of synagogues moving around,” Zander said. “We could help them find an old synagogue.”

Jack Israel, whose father owns the 30-year-old business B.J. Furniture and Antiques Store next door, opposes the mosque for different reasons. Their new neighbors were being “secretive” and “clandestine” about their plans for the mosque, he said. At a late August hearing over the mosque’s fate, he decided to go “scorched earth.” He stood up to speak. “I’m going to say what no one was saying, but every one in that room was thinking” he explained recently.

“It comes down to September 11th,’” he said, “and to the ground zero mosque.” Israel added, “It’s the identical argument when you strip away the veneer.” What had been a diverse community in Rogers Park is becoming predominantly Muslim, a once-Jewish neighborhood was now, according to Israel, “filthy.” Mosques have been proliferating in the neighborhood over the past five years, he claimed, as part as a national upsurge.

In 2000, there were 1,209 mosques in the United States, according to Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islam Studies at the University of Kentucky. Now, in 2010, that number has risen to 1,897. Those growing numbers have alarmed people like Jack Israel. “I love this country and I love the constitution,” he said. But he fears that freedom of religion could backfire. “In the end, our own freedoms could destroy this country,” he added. “That’s a scary proposition.”

Thanks to Zander and Israel’s opposition, the fate of this particular mosque project doesn’t look promising. “We haven’t received any official word, any letter,” Rashid Motiwala, the head of Faizan-e-Madina. “But we heard on the news that the permit had been rejected.”

Such arguments are only a smokescreen for bigotry, according to the members of Faizan-e-Madina. “Deep down in my heart, I believe these are not the real reasons,” Shazad Mahmood, 35, one of Faizan-e-Madina’s Board of Directors said, while seated at a table at Bismillah Restaurant, a Halal establishment a few blocks from the hot dog stand. As he spoke, taxi drivers pulled up outside and came in to pick up their lunches of chicken jalfrezi and vegetable biryani.

“I am a full citizen of the United States,” Mahmood said. “I want my right to exercise my religion. The constitution gives me that right.”

The Islamic group is in the midst of deciding what course of action to take. “We have three options,” Rashid Motiwala, the group’s leader, said: to reapply for a permit; to take the case to court; or simply to move on and find another place to pray. For now, they are favoring the last option. But first they are asking themselves the most basic questions to make sure this battle doesn’t simply play out again on another block. Motiwala is looking for advice. He asks, “Where did we go wrong?”

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.